Why it Matters: Google+ and Diversity, part 2

Over the past 50 hours I’ve lost a lot of friends here, and all of my transgender friends and family and all the older gay activists I was sharing with have all quietly mothballed their accounts. They can’t have their “real” names out there – they work with human rights organizations and do HIV/AIDS activism, etc.

Just a few days before Google+’s doors officially open on July 31, Google’s latest communications from Vic (via Robert) and Bradley on the raft of account suspensions and “common names” policy seem unlikely to put the “identity crisis” to rest. It’s certainly a positive sign that they’re engaging, and process changes like giving people with names Google doesn’t like a week to change their account name before suspending them are certainly improvements. That said, the impression they’re giving is that they’re going to try to hold the line with the current policy even knowing that it targets transgender people, human rights activists, people at risk for stalking and harrassment domestic violence survivors, HIV/AIDS victims and caregivers, people with names that sound weird to Americans (or for that matter people in Hong Kong who would rather go by their English names) …

Hey wait a second, I’m noticing a pattern here.

So yes indeed, as I predicted a week ago in A Work in Progress, it’s a crucial time for diversity on Google+. Given which it seems like a good time to step back and talk a bit about a couple reasons why diversity matters. For me, it starts with some very intensely personal things.

From the personal …

“I do not feel safe using my real name online as I have had people track me down from my online presence and had coworkers invade my private life.”
“I’ve been stalked. I’m a rape survivor. I am a government employee that is prohibited from using my IRL.”
“Under [this name] I am active in a number of areas of sexual difference for which it would not be wise for me to use my flesh legal name.”
“This identity was used to protect my real identity as I am gay and my family live in a small village where if it were openly known that their son was gay they would have problems.”
“I go by pseudonym for safety reasons. Being female, I am wary of internet harassment.”

A lot of my friends and acquaintances are women, blacks, Latin@s, lesbians, gays, transgender people and others who have to deal with similar situations on a routine basis. So I care a lot about diversity, and when I see a company like Google basing their future strategy on creating a social network that excludes my friends and Violet Blue’s and the people responding to Skud’s survey and everybody else like them — or puts them at unnecessary risk — I react strongly.

Of course, personal arguments like that aren’t likely to convince everybody who doesn’t already see things the way I do. And many people at large corporations feel like their personal beliefs in social justice shouldn’t influence their company’s behavior. Back in 2005, when Microsoft dropped support for anti-discrimination legislation in Washington, I remember the pained look on the corporate counsel’s face as he talked with a group of gay and lesbian employees, trying to reconcile his personal belief in equality with his defense of the business reasons not to take a stand. Vic’s own comments at the time reflect somebody wrestling with similar questions.

In the end Vic and Brad and Sergei and Larry et al will make a business decision about what to do. So I’ll now put on my corporate strategist hat and talk about why diversity matters to Google. As I do that, though, I hope nobody loses sight of the people who are affected by the issue, because in the end that a zillion times more than the n-dimensional corporate chess match.

… to the strategic.

Right now, in the early stages, what would help Google Plus most is feedback from female users — ones in both tech and non-tech arenas.

Indeed. For Google+ to reach it’s full potential and blow Facebook and Twitter out of the water, it needs to appeal to women just as much as guys — after all, women spend most of the money on the web these days.** So far, the naming discussions give the impression that even when Google gets feedback from women they’re not hearing a lot of it. As Betsy Hanes Perry says:

Two people who are dear to me have already left. Others in my circle of friends are refusing to join. All of them are established professional women who have excellent reasons to avoid mixing their work-visible streams and their personal streams.

M. M. has a great description of the overall feel she’s noticed with Google+:

Furthermore, although making a joke here or there, posting a somewhat mysogynist photo, or remarking on women’s love of Farmville may seem harmless enough, I think we need to recognize there is a larger picture. What I am speaking of is a collective conscience that forms when people are bombarded with the same images and messages over and over and over. The message for the past week has been ramping up and it seems to be suggesting that we are simply are not as “ready” for Google’s latest social media network. It reminds us, as women, we are in the “wrong place” at Google Plus.

As I was writing this, Hitwise released there latest numbers for the US showing the trend going in the wrong direction: 59% of the visits to Google+ are from guys, up 4% from the previous week. BREAKING: women who say “we are less likely to use Google+ if you insist on deciding what name I can call myself and don’t allow private profiles” are telling the truth!

True, it’s early days so far. But community norms set in relatively quickly. And network effects magnify the impact. The more of your friends who aren’t on Google+, or only use it in just a limited way, the less likely you are to spend a lot of time there.* So Google+ is setting out on a path likely to lead it to being a place that appeals primarily to guys who prefer to talk to guys.

There are many other dimensions to diversity as well; Skud’s survey, Geek Feminism’s excellent list of Who is harmed by a real names policy?, and Kee Hinckley’s roundup all highlight how many market segments Google is alienating on just this one issue. But this post is long enough already, so rather than exploring all the different ramifications, let me just reiterate a key strategic takeaway:

Google’s current approach leaves them at a significant disadvantage with the largest and most valuable demographic.

“Don’t be evil”

Business strategy was a key part of the argument back in 2005, when a grassroots protest, strongly-worded letter from the LGBTQ employees group GLEAM, behind-the-scenes work by the Diversity organization and supportive senior executives, and series of blog posts by a high-profile employee very publicly criticizing the decision all led to Microsoft re-committing to anti-discrimination legislation. In his email announcing the decision, Steve concluded that “diversity in the workplace is such an important issue for our business that it should be included in our legislative agenda”. But the underlying principles mattered just as much. What kind of company did Microsoft want to be? When we talked to our lesbian, bisexual, and transgender friends and relatives, would we be proud of who we worked for — or embarrassed?

Google’s facing similar a choice now. Of course, evil’s subjective; but none of the people I know who work there would feel proud of building a future where women, transgender people, dissidents, whisteblowers, and people with unusual names like their colleague Ping are marginalized.

So especially since the business case is pretty powerful as well, and employee bonuses are tied to success in social networking, I’m actually relatively optimistic that a sensible solution will emerge on the naming front.***

If so, it’ll be a great victory for all the feminists, LGBTQs, sex bloggers, privacy advocates, human rights activists, Second Lifers, usenet old-timers, people with disabilities, security experts, and everybody else speaking up. And if Google then builds on this by actively all these groups they haven’t been paying a lot of attention to so far, my money’s on them to dethrone Facebook and Twitter. We shall see….

To be continued …

jon

* a somewhat-analogous situation: in the Washington Post, Ellen Nakashima cites a 2005 study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project that “the proportion of Internet users who took part in chats and discussion groups plunged from 28 percent in 2000 to 17 percent in 2005, entirely because of the exodus of women.”

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Comments

One of the things that makes Google’s crackdown so frightening for a lot of people is the loss of data. Unlike facebook which is just crap on a newsfeed for the most part, Google offers quite a diverse array of services, from email to documents to blogs and so on. Since they do not clearly define when and how someone has violated ToS (it seems that some people for some sort of unspecified violations beyond “just” the name thing lose more than just access to G+ but also their email, docs, blogs and all that. That has a hugely chilling effect. My account got suspended, and while I still have access to my gmail account, I am backing it up. I am making copies of my docs and such and everything that Google has, because I don’t want to lose it, and I don’t know how far Google will go with this profile.

Looking forward to the second part of your post. I think you’ve touched on the start of why Google should care about creating a diverse group of people on G+ (especially if us women buy more schtuff 🙂 but I don’t know if what you have so far would be sufficient to convince the likes of Gundotra, et al.

I know a Google Doodle isn’t evidence of company policy, but I come back to the Google Pride rainbow where searches that counted as ‘gay’ or LGBT got a rainbow banner. That’s sweet, except several gay friends joked that any algorithm that didn’t put a rainbow on a Lady Gaga search didn’t understand what it means to be gay – and while the joke isn’t serious, trying to do social algorithmically doesn’t work. This emphasis on making a safe mainstream playpen by fixating on the easy reputation of real names feels very algorithmic again.

Danny Sullivan’s article on Search Engine News and the followup discussion on Google+ highlight how Google+ results are already influencing search. People with the most followers benefit the most; People without accounts on Google+ lose out. So women, transgender people, and everybody else who isn’t comfortable with Google’s naming policy will wind up being less visible in Google’s search as well. And almost all of the people with the most followers being guys — with Google’s recommendations making matters worse by mostly suggesting guys.

Blog authors themselves contribute unwittingly to creating a hierarchy within the blogosphere with adult males at the top. They do this by linking to “A-list” blogs, which tend overwhelmingly to be filter-type blogs created by men, thereby contributing to these blogs’ perceived popularity and status. The “A-list” blogs, in turn, link mostly to other men’s blogs: in a count of links from the blogrolls of the top ten blogs (as determined by number of incoming links), Ratliff (2003) found that only 16% led to sites of female bloggers.

Of course Google targeted these A-list bloggers (who were also profiled in Shelley Powers’ Guys Don’t Link) with the initial launch, and they’ve been providing a lot of feedback. So far though none of them seem to be focusing on diversity.

What kinds of activism would be effective at getting Google+ to change its naming policy?…

There’s currently a heated debate about Google’s “common names” policy, which is said to harm women, lgbtq people, children, people with disabilities and medical conditions, human rights activists, and many other groups. What kind of activism wou…

[…] “Why it Matters: Google+ and Diversity” by Jon Pincus (Why the “real name” policy of Google, like Facebook’s, has implications for activists and organizations working with communities who can’t organize in the open.) […]

Robert Braggs III’s video encourages people to tell their stories. Here’s his:

And via Twitter, here’s Doctor Popular’s:

Via Shanghaist, here’s what a Chinese activist had to say:

Please Google+, when you are deciding regulations, you must consider Chinese usage, especially from users in mainland China.
Be sure to consider the user’s actual situation. Please do not force them to use a real-name system. Otherwise, I think that Google will be violating its principle of ‘don’t be evil’.

Here’s the uncomfortable and unpopular truth about how people see pseudonyms vs real names: so-called real names are *nothing more* that security placebos.

A common, supposedly “dignified” or “professional” name is most likely far more difficult to source check than a unique, one of a kind handle. If John Smith decides to start harassing you online, good luck actually figuring out which John Smith it is.

Again, and this cannot be stated enough, “real life personality” is pure security placebo.

The fallacious argument being deployed by some relates to a “real name” providing security in case someone literally needs to be sued or tracked down by the authorities. But if Google for example, has to track down “John Smith” do you know what happens? They don’t have a magical way to instantly locate him because his name looks normal. They have to trace the IP access of the account the same as any other. Whether the user name is John Smith or Greenbunny Surprise, determining who is actually your harasser at the offending IP address is equally difficult.

But it’s a placebo accepted by hundreds of thousands of people because it sounds nice. It sounds safe. By saying “it’s like real life, and not the scary Internet you hear bad things about on the news” they make you think it’s better for you. That you absolutely have to have this crucial security feature.

In order to have some greater form of online security for social accounts, you’d have to get into the messy world of demanding from every single user a government ID that matches a valid address and phone number. And even then, people who are actually trying to do ill can easily doctor a scan of a government ID and email it in.

I have seen my name invoked on both sides of the debate… I am for preserving pseudonymity, and believe that eliminating it will never stop the worst of the trolls, griefers, haters, and stalkers. There are far better ways to help reduce the worst of anonymity-fueled behavior online including plain old moderation. The ‘net of 2011 is not the ‘net of 2007; in just a few years we have moved from a cultural standard of moderation-is-evil (or at least a violation of all that is good and true about the Internet) to moderation-is-expected-and-welcome (except by those who are moderated).

Horrific behavior online — fueled heavily by anonymity — is strengthened and repeated because it is reinforced. For way too many years, the most hateful comments were not just tolerated but high-fived (see: YouTube, Digg, and many blog and forum comments)

Worse, the online hate comments then escalate in a need to one-up the previous high-fived hateful comment and we went from “you are a moron” to “you deserve to be raped and murdered, and here is how it should be done in explicit detail (bonus for Photoshopped example!)” over the course of a decade. If hate-fueled behavior is no longer reinforced *everywhere*, and communities are free to set their own cultural standards instead of all being a race to the bottom, some of the worst forms of anonymous behavior online will disappear.

Regardless, it seems like it could never be worth the risk to force a “real name” policy. If I had it all to do over again, I would not have begun my web presence under my real name. Not so much because of what happened to *me* (I chose to be public), but because other people I care about were dragged in and abused simply because they were related to me.

That said, I have been part of long-standing, highly successful communities that used a “seems kind of real” policy, and it worked surprisingly well. I don’t think it is necessary, but it does support a level of civility in some groups when it “feels” like you are talking to a real human based on the name. There’s a speck of science that suggests why that might be the case… but again, I don’t believe it is necessary and I certainly don’t agree that eliminating pseudonymity is the answer to the deterioration of communities online. Keep the pseudonyms and lose the assholes.

This would make a good murder mystery. Who is going to be the next to have their account suspended. Except for the fact that it is really happening and we know the company that is doing it, but we can’t do anything about it that doesn’t compromise safety, privacy or just net etiquette.

A mystery is good and exciting, but this is stressful. You don’t know if you should continue to invite your friends to this as you don’t even know if you will be the next to get the axe, or if your friends will be treated this way as well. If they continue with this treatment then there is nothing social about this social network, as it keeps killing the users.

My Name Is Me, supporting the freedom to choose the name you want on social networks, is beautifully designed: people’s pictures along with their reasons for choosing their name. As I write this, the two most recent entries are from s. e. smith, telling us why activists and people with disabilities need to protect their privacy online, and Sudanese blogger Amir Ahmad Nasr aka Drima. And there are quite a few others …

[…] have gone so utterly, utterly wrong with this. Google appears to be committed to this anti-social, anti-privacy, anti-user policy. I have been inviting friends and family to Google+ and encouraging them to […]

Google responded tonight to the widespread criticism of its controversial Real Names Policy. Some artists, abuse survivors, political activists in repressive countries and their advocates have argued vehemently against Google’s requirement that Plus accounts be registered under real names…. No defense of the policy was offered by the company, just an explanation that real names reflected the intent of the social network’s creators and a pointer to the door. If you don’t like it, you’re free to export your data and leave, Google said.

“Google was not surprised by this; Google knew this was coming.” Skud says that something on the order of 1,000 employees at Google warned that the naming policy was flawed prior to Google+’s launch but were ignored.

“They’re so scared of this idea that ‘Google sucks at social,’” she says, after what happened with Buzz and Wave, that “they’re just copying Facebook’s names policy and hoping it’ll work for them too.”

There are a lot of questions about the methodology that FindPeopleOnPlus.com uses, so take the data with a grain of salt. Still, most people I talk to think it matches with their experience: a male/female ratio of roughly 2-to-1.

The truth is, however, men and women not only operate differently in real life, they operate differently online as well. “Women’s behavior online … is less transactional and more relationship-driven,” according to Businessweek. The subtle point-of-view shift between men and women is likely to create different feedback between the two groups — feedback that could alter the direction of Google Plus.

Maybe Google gets this argument. It certainly stepped up month at BlogHer’s 2011 conference, demonstrating Google Plus (and it’s popular hangouts). Google gave BlogHer’s founders 3000 G+ invites for conference goers. But I can’t help but wonder it this is too little too late.

Inviting 3000 bloggers after Google Plus has over 20 million users, over a month after it’s launch, feels a bit like men were sent an invitation to the party by mail while women were sent a text message after the party had started.

[…] or anything, but Google can change course at any time if they want to. As Kathy Sierra says, keep the pseudonyms and lose the assholes. Drop the name policing; instead, introduce some decent moderation tools and enforce […]

Right now, Google+ is populated by technically savvy younger males, as well as wealthy suburbanites. Future demographics are likely to broaden, ultimately to teens, women, and the middle and lower middle classes.

Because Google+ is more sophisticated, complex, and later to launch than Facebook, however, the demographics are unlikely to be as broad as Facebook’s anytime soon.

Hmm. Putting aside for a moment whether or not G+ is substantially more complicated than Facebook, most of the teens I know are pretty good at dealing with complexity. So are most of the women. And a lot of middle- and lower-class people were using customizing the heck out of their MySpace profiles before Facebook came along, so they don’t seem to have any problem with complexity either — or late adoption, because they’re mostly on Facebook now.

So here’s how I’d rewrite it, based on G+’s first few months:

Because Google+ chose an mostly-male and tech-focused “elite” group for their initial seed, and then adopted a policy that’s harmful to women and marginalized groups, the demographics are unlikely to be as broad as Facebook’s anytime soon.

Sarah Kessler’s article on Mashable has the details, along with some good context about gender ratios on other social networks. Social Statistics and Find People on Plus both report that G+ is 68%, down from 87% right after they launched and 74% in mid-July.

Take the statistics with a grain of salt — back in July, Paul Allen made some excellent points about Social Statistics and Find People on Plus’ methodology. With the majority of the conversation on G+ happening in private circles, and so many inactive accounts, it’s hard to get an accurate measurement from the outside. But it’s in line with other estimates, and fairly similar to my own experiences and the feedback I’ve gotten from others. If anything I’d say it underestimates the gender differentials; most comment threads are 75-90% male; 80% of the most-reshared posts get by guys (along with Felicia Day, Victoria Belmont, Britney, and Ashley Tisdale).

In any case I see the trend somewhat differently. Back in July, the most recent credible estimate (by Paul Allen) was 2/3 male and the general response was “yeah G+ is a sausage fest, but it’s still just the geeky early adopters, and the trend is positive!”. Today, the most recent credible estimate is 2/3 male, and the general response is “yeah G+ is a sausage fest but it’s still just the geeky early adopters, and the trend is positive!”. It sure doesn’t seem like a lot has changed in four months.